Back in the 10th and 11th centuries, Viking raiders would set forth from Norway in mid-October, after the harvest was laid in. They’d go to sea and loiter off the coast of the various nations, waiting.
Waiting.
And on the morning after Thanksgiving, the Vikings would strike. They counted on catching the locals – the indolent French, the filthy Irish, the martinetical Germans, the hapless English – in the throes of hangovers and awash in tryptophan. The locals, disabled by wine and whisky and turkey and thinking only of the ceremonial winter market, were at a low ebb of alertness and competence, leaving them easy pickings.
The Vikings would storm ashore, hauling away longships full of swag; French wine and cheeses, German oxcarts, Irish filth and emigrants, and any foodstuffs the English hadn’t yet cooked.
And that is the true legacy of Black Friday.
Well, it’s as true as Toni Braxton’s version of it seems to be.
On the day before a big holiday: send a cameraman and a reporter to the airport!
On the day after Thanksgiving, send a cameraman and a reporter to the mall!
Do not underestimate the sheer laziness of journalists. These are people who think that talking into a microphone or typing words is ‘work’. Even with this low-level of calorie-conserving ‘work’, they still cheat and plagiarize when they think that they can get away with it. There is a reason that cut-n-paste journalism is so easy to commit and so hard to detect, SOP is writing the same stories off of the same templates, over and over again.
“This just in — an undercover journalist has exposed that a major US corporation intends to increase profits by charging consumers more and paying its workers less! Now to our Washington Bureau, where our reporters, who know nothing about economics or business, are asking congressmen, who nothing about economics or business, what they think the government should do about it!”